05/15/16

TIMELINE: Flip-flopping Donald now wants to raise the federal minimum wage (video)

By: Renee Nal | New Zeal

Trump tweets that he wants to raise federal minimum wage

Trump tweets that he wants to raise federal minimum wage

Donald Trump repeatedly blatantly changes his positions on a whim and his position on whether or not there should be a federal minimum wage is no exception. The idea of a “minimum wage” is antithetical to conservatism, as it interferes with the free market. A minimum wage, particularly one unconstitutionally set by the federal government, puts young people out of work, as it removes the bottom rung of the ladder.

Donald Trump has expressed his support for the federal minimum wage. Donald Trump also said he wanted the minimum wage to be set by the states. Donald Trump said the current federal minimum wage is too low. Donald Trump also said a low minimum wage is a good thing.

Here is a list of Donald Trump’s actual words on the minimum wage:

  • August 20, 2015: ““Now, I want to create jobs so that you don’t have to worry about the minimum wage, you’re doing a great job, and you’re making much more than the minimum wage,” he said via phone on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “But I think having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country.”
  • November 10, 2015: “…But, taxes too high, wages too high, we’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.”

Read more here…

01/30/15

Sarah Palin Is Right: Go on Offense, Tout Conservatism

By: Lloyd Marcus

Sarah PalinForty years ago when my Aunt Nee was the pastor of the Holy Temple Church of Truth, an east Baltimore storefront, during testimony service Sister Davis or Sister Cleary would spontaneously lead the tiny congregation in singing, “We’re Livin’ In the Last Days.” “They’re calling wrong right. They’re calling right wrong. Surely, we’re livin’ in the last days!”

As I listened to Sarah Palin’s speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, I was elated that she once again displayed her exemplary leadership by not joining the chorus of those on our side who believe touting true Conservatism is a loser. Palin said we should expose the Left’s false premises and educate the public to the benefits and virtues of Conservatism. http://bit.ly/1z1jW8y Wow! How simple and right on target is that?

Many Republicans believe we have lost the argument and the only way to win votes is to abandon core principles, surrender and campaign according to the Left’s/Democrats’ false premises. In essence, they want the GOP to call wrong right and right wrong.

For example: Dems argue that requiring a photo ID to vote disenfranchises blacks. A GOP presidential contender suggested that the GOP drop the requirement to show a photo ID to vote, citing that it offends African Americans. http://bit.ly/1K1KpEp Well, as an American who happens to be black, I find the absurd assumption that it is too challenging to ask blacks to find their way to the DMV to acquire a photo ID extremely insulting and offensive. Showing a photo ID is a reasonable common sense solution to combating rampant Democrat voter fraud. The GOP line should be the same for all Americans. If you want to vote, show a photo ID. Period.

Some on our side are pandering to Obama’s lie that raising the minimum wage will help fix income inequality; once again calling wrong right and right wrong. http://1.usa.gov/15N4Tmy As Palin suggested in her speech, the GOP should be educating voters to the truth; explain why free market solutions are most beneficial to all Americans and the right thing to do.

Some GOP presidential contenders have embraced Common Core, big government overreaching control of the education of our kids. http://bit.ly/1uyWoC8

I get a bit queasy when members of the GOP start using liberal lingo and embracing premises such as man-made climate change, income inequality and white privilege. My “danger Will Robinson” alert goes off when GOP members start talking about fixing Obamacare, despite winning the election on their vow to repeal it. Shockingly, many in the GOP secretly want to allow Obama’s outrageous executive amnesty to stand. http://bit.ly/1Df0GDO

Man-made climate change is a hoax. Period. http://bit.ly/1EpwKsd

Allowing absurd evil liberal Democrat premises to gain momentum have dire consequences. Their lie that white cops routinely murder blacks lead to the assassination of two NYPD officers. White privilege is another Democrat made-up crisis.

Remarkably, a St. Paul, Minnesota school district spend $60k of taxpayer dollars attending “White Privilege” conferences. Talk about the bigotry of lowered expectations, the conferences suggest that black students should not be expected to be on time or work hard because neither concept are a part of their culture. Give me a break. http://bit.ly/1yMf4nb

It is vital that our 2016 presidential candidate be over the “Obama is black thing”, unafraid to deal with Obama as an arrogant lawless tyrant.

Terrified of being called racist, the GOP has allowed Obama to act like a far left radical kid in America’s candy store; insulated from criticism and rebuke by his black-skin coat of armor.

Over the past six and a half years, a socialist/progressive zealot has crept out of the Left’s handsome well-spoken black man Trojan Horse. http://bit.ly/1EqjBzd His mission is to destroy America as founded from within; the Constitution, the law, congress, the senate and the American people be damned. Obama’s strategy is to federalize as much of our land http://bit.ly/1yNGtFf, economy and lives as possible, thus repealing as many of our freedoms as possible.

From the beginning, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party tried to warn America about Obama, only to be marginalized in the minds of many by the mainstream media. They branded Palin and the Tea Party stupid, crazy and a bunch of redneck racists hating on our first black president.

The mainstream media game plan to defeat us in 2016 is quite simple. First they hammer us with the notion that any GOP candidate who defends the Constitution and advocates for limited government is extreme. Thus, to win, we must embrace liberal Democrat false premises.

The MSM then selects a “moderate” candidate which they praise to the hilt. But once we fall for their con and make the moderate RINO our official presidential nominee, they launch a vitriolic campaign portraying our candidate as the devil incarnate.

As Palin has stated, in 2016 only a presidential candidate who inspires, pleasantly educates and boldly articulates Conservatism will do.

Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Chairman, Conservative Campaign Committee

01/23/15

Mendacity is Still the State of the Union

By: Roger Aronoff
Accuracy in Media

Following last year’s State of the Union address by President Barack Obama, I titled my column “The State of the Union is Mendacity.” It is quite remarkable how little within it would need to be changed to have it apply to this week’s State of the Union. From the recovering economy, to negotiations with Iran, to the containment and defeat of “violent extremism,” to equal pay for women and the need to combat climate change, to a call for a minimum wage hike—there is little difference between the laundry lists presented by President Obama in 2014 and 2015.

But there is a major difference in the political climate.

“The most important omission [in the President’s State of the Union] was the fact that there were 83 fewer Democrats in the chamber this year than the first time he gave a State of the Union speech and dozens less than the number of his fellow party members that were there last year,” writes Jonathan S. Tobin for Commentary magazine. “The historic rejection of both the president’s party and his policies in last November’s midterm elections was treated in the speech as if it had never happened.”

Instead, America was treated to a laundry list of liberal agenda items, right after President Obama first said he would “focus less on a checklist of proposals, and focus more on the values at stake in the choices before us.”

“When we looked at what Obama actually proposed, all we found was a musty laundry list of liberal programs, most of which already got huge boosts in spending and failed to deliver on their promises,” comments Investors Business Daily.

Yet President Obama’s worn-out list was greeted with praise from the mainstream media. NBC Today Show co-host Savannah Guthrie cheered Obama as “displaying renewed swagger in his sixth address to the nation as he outlined a vision for the final two years of his presidency.”

The New York Times said that “It was hardly surprising that a president who expects so little from Congress devoted some of his speech to celebrating the things that he has accomplished against considerable odds.”

“In fact, he seemed so confident you would have thought he had just won another election,” asserted Jonathan Karl of ABC News.

President Obama’s comment that he has “no more campaigns to run” was greeted with applause and laughter, to which he retorted, “I know because I won both of them.”

Rather than pointing to how the 2014 election could be seen as a referendum on President Obama’s failed policies, Matt Lauer, co-host of NBC’s Today Show, asked Vice President Joe Biden whether he saw “that as a moment of disrespect? Was it a symptom of the very pettiness that the President was referring to?” He also salivated over a potential 2016 Biden presidential bid, asking, “You’re known as a guy who can work a room. Boy, are you good at that. Do you think you could work that room, Vice President Biden?” Lauer didn’t ask a single question challenging any of Obama’s claims or assertions from the night before.

While the mainstream media cheer, others have a more critical view of what Tobin calls Obama’s credibility gap “that is as wide as the Grand Canyon.”

“What Obama has delivered is not an address, but a black hole of lies in which each lie clusters next to a dozen more until it is impossible to see the light,” writes Daniel Greenfield. For example, “Obama insists on taking credit for an energy revolution that he battled every step of the way and continues to fight with his Keystone veto threat,” writes Greenfield. “Instead of admitting that fracking and cheap Saudi oil made the difference, he went on touting his solar and wind boondoggles that have cost a fortune.”

President Obama also touted such green energy “successes” in his 2014 address.

“Obama also claims to have beaten Putin,” writes Greenfield. “There’s only one minor problem with that. In the real world, Russia still controls Crimea. While in the unreal world, Obama controls CNN.”

And The Washington Post editorial board concluded the day after President Obama’s State of the Union, that there is a “pervasive disconnect in Western thinking about the regime of Vladimir Putin”—and that “Russian forces, after several weeks of relative calm” had just “launched a new offensive in eastern Ukraine.”

President Obama also asserted in his speech that “we’ve halted the progress of the nuclear program” in Iran and “reduced its stockpile of nuclear material.” He then threatened to veto any sanctions bill “that threatens to undo this progress.” He is referring to a likely bipartisan bill calling for additional sanctions if negotiations with Iran fall apart. The idea is to incentivize Iran to make a deal wherein it agrees to end its nuclear weapons capability, but President Obama says that if Congress were to pass such a bill, “the risks and likelihood this ends up at some point a military confrontation is heightened.”

“The more I hear from the administration and its quotes, the more it sounds like talking points that come straight out of Tehran,” said Democratic Senator Robert Menendez (NJ) the day after the President’s speech.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker column took a look at the claims by the President of having “halted the progress of the nuclear program” and of having “reduced its stockpile of nuclear material,” and gave those claims three Pinocchios, meaning, “Significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions.”

Regarding the President’s refusal to refer to “Islamic” terrorism or extremism, another Democrat took exception. She is Rep. Tulsi Gabbard who is and has been in the Army National Guard for more than a decade. She served a one-year combat tour of duty in Iraq starting in 2004, and a second tour in the Middle East a few years later. Gabbard is the first American Samoan and the first Hindu to serve in the U.S. Congress—now in her second term—representing a district in Hawaii. Gabbard was on Neil Cavuto’s show on the Fox News Channel, and told Cavuto:

Terminology in the use of this specific term is important…last night the President came and talked to Congress about coming to request an authorization to use military force. By his not using this term, Islamic extremism, and clearly identifying our enemy, it raised a whole host of questions in exactly what congress will be authorizing. Who will we be targeting? Who is our enemy? And unless you understand who your enemy is, unless you clearly identify your enemy, then you cannot come up with a very effective strategy to defeat that enemy. So this is what’s giving me great concern as we look specifically at this authorization, but also as we look at this overall issue of how do we defeat this threat of Islamic extremism that’s not just occurring in the Middle East, that isn’t just about this one group called ISIS, or another group called al Qaeda. It’s a much larger war, really, that is as much an ideological war as it is a military war.

Amidst the dangerously conciliatory stance that the President has adopted toward Iran, and the weak military effort to “degrade and defeat ISIL,” the media should praise Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for inviting Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to speak to Congress about the growing Iranian threat. Instead, Politico criticizes that “the Speaker didn’t consult with the administration before inviting Netanyahu to address Congress,” and the Speaker is “setting up his most dramatic foreign policy confrontation with President Barack Obama to date.” The speech is scheduled for March 3rd.

Not only is Congress a co-equal branch of government, with the ability to invite whomever they want, but President Obama made the highlight of his last State of the Union executive action—and going around Congress when they won’t comply with his agenda.

“He expects us to stand idly by and do nothing while he cuts a bad deal with Iran. Two words: ‘Hell no!’ … We’re going to do no such thing,” said Speaker Boehner.

The Speaker’s move is a show of support for Israel, and the Western leader who, more than any other, faces the daily threat of Islamic jihadist terrorism, and the very real threat of an Iranian regime that has explicitly stated on numerous occasions their plans to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

The White House has already announced that the President won’t be meeting with Netanyahu on that trip, saying that it’s too close to Israel’s election, also slated for March. It will be interesting to see what, if any, pressure the Obama administration puts on Netanyahu to cancel his planned address. Speaker Boehner is betting that Netanyahu has more credibility in this country on Iran and Islamic jihadi terrorism than President Obama does. And there is probably no one who can better speak to these matters with such authority and eloquence.

It should certainly make for a better speech than this year’s policy prescriptions recycled from last year, even if the media were determined to shower President Obama with undeserved, fawning praise for simply showing up.

01/3/15

‘Economics professors’ trash entrepreneurs, argue for taxing the rich

By: Renee Nal
New Zeal

Occupy

Photo Source: commons.wikimedia.org

An OpEd posted at the Tampa Bay Times by Economics professors William L. Holahan and Charles O. Kroncke (retired) begins with the sentence: “It is a common misconception that entrepreneurs create jobs.” Instead, they argue, taxpayer funded “investments” into education and infrastructure is what empowers the “true job creator: the workings of the market.”

The roads and bridges argument has been used by President Obama in his infamous “You didn’t build that” speech, where he argued that entrepreneurs are powerless without the help of others:

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

He continued to tout the power of the government:

The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet.

This is a common argument used by advocates of big government and yes, contrary to the Constitution.

The federal government has no business spending money on local roads and schools. At least if one considers the Constitution, which many do not, of course. After a law passed for federal funding to build the Erie Canal, for example, President James Madison said that although the project was needed and valuable, he was “constrained” by the Constitution and he vetoed the bill.

But the canal was still built anyway. How?

…the New York State legislature took the matter into its own hands and approved state funding for the canal in 1816, with tolls to pay back the state treasury for upon completion.

As professor of history at Hillsdale College Burt Folsom observes:

The Constitution does not grant Congress the right to appropriate funds for infrastructure. Therefore, the Founders usually argued that states or private companies should do the work; neither good government nor just results occurred when the people in Georgia could be taxed to pave a road or build a canal in New York.

While speaking of the size of government, James Madison wrote in Federalist 48,

It will not be denied that power is of an encroaching nature and that it ought to be effectually restrained from passing the limits assigned to it.

The authors continue,

The fixation on the ‘job-creator’ myth also distorts recession-fighting measures. For example, cutting business taxes when the problem is inadequate demand will not encourage employers to restore lost jobs or to hire more people.

If the problem is “inadequate demand,” the employers should be a bit more entrepreneurial… or fail. That is the beauty of the free market and why government intervention in industries always (always) fails. If an individual can provide a good or service that fulfills a need, he or she is on the way to job creation despite the federal government, which helps to keep innovators from success with their endless regulations and tax requirements. The government, in other words, only serves as an obstacle to true entrepreneurship.

While testifying that the website for the Affordable Care Act was getting closer to being fully functional, Kathleen Sebelius, former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said something very telling:

While there is more work to be done, the team is operating with velocity and effectiveness that matches high performing private sector organizations.

The private sector simply does it better.

The economists quote Nick Hanauer, billionaire venture capitalist and strong supporter and higher taxes, as saying:

Taxing the rich to make investments in the middle class is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

Hanauer loves taxes, as evidenced by this recent tweet:

Holahan and Kroncke have written several articles previously and co-wrote the book “Economics for Voters.” In September, the dynamic duo also argued for a minimum wage increase, which has been found by numerous studies to have a negative effect on low-skilled workers. As reported at Politifact,

The last three federal minimum wage increases (2007, 2008 and 2009) were followed by significant job losses, but that was all taking place amidst the global financial crisis. [emphasis added]

It is not a stretch to consider that raising the wage is really just a political ploy, consequences be damned. The double bonus for the federal government (with their unpaid interns, exempting themselves from the Fair Labor Standard Act), is that minimum wage increases equate to higher taxes. Big government supporters continually and desperately attempt to justify the value of big government, but continually come up short.

This article has been cross-posted at Broadside News.